Hope Dies Last

One of Heatmap’s 18 Climate Books to Read in 2025

The award-winning environmental journalist’s extraordinary, long-awaited portrait of hope and resilience as we face a fractured and uncertain future

In this profoundly human and moving narrative, the bestselling author of The World Without Us returns with a book ten years in the making: a study of what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet’s existential crisis. His new book, Hope Dies Last, is a literary evocation of our current predicament and the core resolve of our species against the most precarious odds we have ever faced.

To write this book, Weisman traveled the globe, witnessing climate upheaval and other devastations, and meeting the people striving to mitigate and undo our past transgressions. From the flooding Marshall Islands to revived wetlands in Iraq, from the Netherlands and Bangladesh to the Korean DMZ and to cities and coastlines in the U.S. and around the world, he has encountered the best of humanity battling heat, hunger, rising tides, and imperiled nature. He profiles the innovations of big thinkers—engineers, scientists, conservationists, economists, architects, and artists—as they conjure wildly creative, imaginative responses to an uncertain, ominous future. At this unprecedented point in history, as our collective exploits on this planet may lead to our own undoing and we could be among the species marching toward extinction, they refuse to accept defeat.

Hope Dies Last fills a crucial gap in the global conversation: Having reached a point of no return in our climate confrontation, how do we feel, behave, act, plan, and dream as we approach a future decidedly different from what we had expected?

Author Biography

Alan Weisman has reported from all seven continents and in more than sixty countries. His books include the New York Times bestseller The World Without Us, translated into thirty-four languages and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of China’s Wenjin Book Prize; and Countdown, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Orion, Mother Jones, Discover, and Salon, among others, and on NPR. A cofounder of the journalism collective Homelands Productions, he has also been laureate professor of international journalism at the University of Arizona. He and his wife, sculptor Beckie Kravetz, live in western Massachusetts.